Ren&eacute A. Guzman: “Buffy” season 8 — comics style

I first spotted this jolly good news at Newsarama: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator Joss Whedon tells Entertainment Weekly he’s bringing back his hit TV show to comics for what he calls an eighth season.

Here’s the money graph from the EW article, which Newsarama links in its post:

Joss Whedon misses his famous creation, too. Which is why he’s returning to it three years after the show’s final episode with a new comic book series, slated to debut in March, that continues Buffy’s adventures. Whedon, 42, is running the comic as if it were a TV show; after writing the first four issues (a premise-establishing pilot), he’ll oversee other scribes who will write the remaining issues (think: episodes) in what is planned to be 25-to-30-issue saga. ”We’re calling it season 8,” says Whedon, ”and we’re picking up almost right after season seven left off. I don’t know exactly why it or how it happened. I just thought, ‘Oh, I could do that! It would be fun!’ It happens to me every now and then, and causes me to commit to things I really don’t have time for.”

As a comic writer, Whedon’s come a long way from his heady days of “Fray,” his “Buffy” of the future that took him forever to finish. When I interviewed him for that project years ago, he talked about how his Buffyverse has always been influenced by comics, most notably the X-Men. Which makes sense given Whedon’s equally astonishing work on “Astonishing X-Men.”